Tuesday 17 April 2007

on holby city,
les dennis dying like a
failed comedian


I am grateful to the marvellous Popbitch for the following snippet of news from Russia.

‘No gays in Chelyabinsk. Russian pipe makers: not metrosexual

Russia's version of Little Britain is called Our Russia. One of its characters is "the only gay milling machine operator in Chelyabinsk" (an industrial city in the Ural mountains). Workers at a real-life pipe making plant in Chelyabinsk are not amused. The company contacted the programme makers to say, "Why are you telling lies? We don't have any gays!"’

I think the warm weather has drawn the lunatics out of hiding. At the weekend while waiting for a 295 bus I was approached by three different drunken men. This is obviously not a new experience for me, but it’s not the sort of thing I expect at two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon while I’m weighed down with Tesco bags.
The first asked me if I was a Polack. When I said ‘no’, he asked me for twenty pence. It’s not an unreasonable request so I parted with the cash quite readily. Maybe Polacks aren’t so charitable, and he was just checking first. Some five minutes later another man appeared, and told me he was from Southampton and couldn’t get back. I suspect he’d swapped his ticket for a barrel of rum. He too, asked me for some change, but I explained he’d already been gazumped by a Pole. He was OK about that, and began rambling, while attempting to remain upright, about shaven heads and the weather.
Then he staggered away, only to be almost immediately replaced by an even drunker man who took his asthma inhaler from his pocket, aimed it like a gun and pretended to shoot some Indian men walking up the street toward us.
Luckily it appears that they knew who he was (I think they run the local off-licence) and were not discomfited by his act of inhaler-based terrorism.
At that point the bus arrived. A (presumably) gay man sat opposite me, clutching two greyhound puppies and gabbling incessantly in Italian on a mobile all the way to my stop. The poor puppies gazed at me, as if pleading for rescue, no doubt hoping I was packing a loaded inhaler, or at the very least some doggy earplugs.